Many organizations, for example law firms and business consultants, realize substantial portions of their revenue through conversations with clients, in which a professional speaks with a client to gather information or to render advice. Many conversations are conducted by telephone, with the time a professional spends on the call being tracked so that the time can be billed to the appropriate client and task. In typical prior art systems, tracking of calls may be the responsibility of a telephone user, who makes manual time entries noting the duration of a call and the client account to which the call relates. Making such manual entries is inconvenient, and it is likely that calls will occur for which the time spent on the call will not be properly accounted for. If time spent on a call is properly accounted for and billed, the call contributes to revenue. Failure to collect billing and accounting data for a call diminishes revenue.
Various prior art systems for the tracking of calls employ greater or less degrees of automation in order to assist in accounting for the time spent on the calls. Such systems may simply display the duration of the call for the caller to aid manual entry of call data. Other systems allow the caller to enter a caller identification when making a call, as well as a billing account identifier. Such entries are typically made manually using a telephone keypad. Billing account identifiers may be relatively complex, for example consisting of two relatively long numbers, one identifying a client and a second identifying a particular project being conducted for the client. A number of deficiencies exist in such approaches. A caller may work on a number of different tasks during a single call, each task requiring the use of a different task identifier for proper billing. Many callers may find manual entry of task identifiers inconvenient, and thus may sometimes fail to enter correct billing information. In addition, many call tracking systems that require manual input of identification information do not provide any way to verify that the correct information has been entered. A nonexistent billing account number may therefore be entered, resulting in the expenditure of time and effort to correct the error. If the correct billing account number cannot be ascertained, the revenue for the call may be lost. Moreover, systems that track identifiers for outgoing calls do not typically track the data for incoming calls. There exists, therefore, a need for techniques for collecting needed data relating to revenue generating calls in ways that are convenient for a user and help to insure consistent and correct accounting for the calls.